SAEMark: Steering Personalized Multilingual LLM Watermarks with Sparse Autoencoders

Zhuohao Yu, Xingru Jiang, Weizheng Gu, Yidong Wang, Qingsong Wen, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Watermarking LLM-generated text is critical for content attribution and misinformation prevention, yet existing methods compromise text quality and require white-box model access with logit manipulation or training, which exclude API-based models and multilingual scenarios. We propose SAEMark, an inference-time framework for multi-bit watermarking that embeds personalized information through feature-based rejection sampling, fundamentally different from logit-based or rewriting-based approaches: we do not modify model outputs directly and require only black-box access, while naturally supporting multi-bit message embedding and generalizing across diverse languages and domains. We instantiate the framework using Sparse Autoencoders as deterministic feature extractors and provide theoretical worst-case analysis relating watermark accuracy to computational budget. Experiments across 4 datasets demonstrate strong watermarking performance on English, Chinese, and code while preserving text quality. SAEMark establishes a new paradigm for scalable, quality-preserving watermarks that work seamlessly with closed-source LLMs across languages and domains.